Introduction -- Table of Contents -- I. Case study Italy. Specific traits of the national development -- 1. Italy as an invented nation -- 2. Problem of Italian identity -- 3. Italian regionalisms -- 4. Southern question -- 5. Italy and the global community -- II. Identity, history, fiction -- 1. Collective identity -- 2. Collective memory -- 3. Media of group identities: collective memory and literature -- III. The new historical novel and its hallmarks -- 1. Narrative construction of history -- 2. The upper limit of the "past" -- 3. The extension of a novel as a sociocultural specific -- 4. Intermediality -- 5. The ontological dominant and the fantastic -- IV. Hierarchies of the past -- 1. Historical settings of the novels -- 2. Making and re-making the Italians: the historical roots of the nation -- V. Roman Empire and beyond -- 1. The intricate legacy of the Roman Empire -- 2. The Etruscan past as a feeble myth of origins -- 3. Celtic ancestry -- 4. Celtic legacy and regionalist aspirations in North-Eastern Italy -- 5. Conclusions -- VI. The many Middle Ages -- 1. The periodisation of the Middle Ages in historiography -- 2. Dialectics of European medievalism -- 3. Italian medievalism of the 19th century and the romanzo storico risorgimentale -- 4. Taxonomy of contemporary medievalisms -- 5. Postmodern neo-medievalism -- 6. EU-inspired neo-medievalism -- 7. The otherwordly Middle Ages: a flight from modernity -- 8. Synthesising the Middle Ages: two literary case studies -- 9. Conclusions -- VII. Bitter milk of the holy cow: Contemporarycritique of modernity -- 1. Debasing the Renaissance -- 2. The Seicento -- 3. The Enlightenment -- 4. "An unfinished business": The Risorgimento -- 5. Conclusions -- VIII. Quo vadis? Roots and routes of modernItaly -- Bibliography -- Primary sources -- Secondary sources -- List of title abbreviations.

Appendix 1. Interview with Emma Pomilio.